Description
This paper focuses on the complex, often conflicting gendered dynamics associated with the phenomenon of constructing memorials to conscientious objectors across Britain. Although there are many types and forms of war memorialisation, including a traditional Cenotaph/obelisk-like memorial, commemorative windows/benches, memorials featuring a figure of the lone male soldier, recent memorials to women-soldiers and soldiers from diverse ethnic backgrounds, the design of memorials to conscientious objectors has proved to be a challenge to the artists as well as researchers. In most cases, artists and commemorative commissions favoured the abstract and vegetal designs, with ‘peace’ trees as a primary example of a ‘conscientious objection’ to war. In my intervention, I utilise Charlotte Heath-Kelly’s concept of the multivocality and liminality of the ‘survivor memorial trees’ (2018) in addition to Sylvester’s work on memorials to defeats and loss (2021; see also Gough 2001;2006) and Welch’s analysis of German deserter memorials (2017). I argue that the analysis of aesthetics, the making and everyday interaction with memorial spaces allows us to unpack the complex, multivocal and often inherently conflicting gendered logics of memorialising peace. Whereas memorials to conscientious objectors attempt to simultaneously challenge the masculine associations with war/soldiering as well as dissociate themselves from the feminine, passive interpretations of peace, their very existence is built around the negotiation of conflicting gendered meaning-making practices of peace. My analysis is inspired by the story of the Scottish memorial to conscientious objectors (Kenefick 2019), designed by the Glaswegian artist Kate Ive, and known as ‘The handkerchief tree’ (to be unveiled in Edinburgh, at the Princes Gardens in 2021).
